let's just say that you get a big scratch on your eye it's red painful watery you go into your eye
doctor and your eye doctor puts a band-aid on your eye but not just any band-aid but a bandage
contact lens sends you home some eye drops you come back the next day
they take the contact lens out and you find out that your scratch
is nearly fully healed can this actually happen is this real let's focus in
hey howdy everybody this is Dr. Neal Guymon, Dr. EyeGuy, helping you with your eyes and your vision
now contact lenses have many different applications than just vision in fact for
many years now they've been used as bandage contact lenses to help your eyes heal so in
this video i wanted to go over the many different applications and scenarios where contact lenses
may be useful now the idea behind bandage contact lenses is that you're allowing the cornea to heal
you're giving it a shield a shield from the air exposure also a shield from your own eyelid from
the friction of your own eyelid it can also act as a guide for the new tissue that needs to come in
and restore the cornea for the epithelial layer of the cornea now ultimately your doctor is going
to decide if a bandage contact lens is going to be worth it it might depend on the size of the
scratch the pain the irritation all these things kind of play a role in determining if a bandage
contact lens is going to help you out now if they use a bandage contact lens they'll likely use an
antibiotic eye drop that you'll use and a steroid eye drop to reduce inflammation as well totally
depends on the scenario but yeah just expect that you'll still be using eye drops and likely
artificial tears to keep the eye from getting infected and reduce inflammation now in studies
bandage contact lenses have been shown to improve the comfort after an eye injury sometimes if you
put a bandage contact lens on a patient they'll immediately feel better they'll walk out of the
office being able to tolerate blinking and their eye won't water as much and then they just sleep
in that lens and come back the next day take the contact out and the injury is actually healed up
quite a bit depending on the size of the injury of course it's also been shown to improve the vision
after an eye injury and also the healing time it can actually make your eye heal faster and better
there are three contact lens brands out there that are fda approved for bandage contact lens wear
accu-view oasis air optics night and day and pure vision contact lenses now another huge category
where bandage contact lenses are used and that's with eye surgery a few examples would be lasik prk
sometimes with cataract surgery pterygium removal surgeries or certain growth benign growth removal
surgeries from the surface of the eye and the idea there is the same the contact lens is acting
as a shield or a protector to the cornea for example with lasik they have a fresh peeled back
flap on the cornea they do the laser and they put the flap back a bandage contact lens goes right on
top of that flap and it will protect the flap from the air protect the flap from your own eyelid from
pushing or moving that flap around it also allows the cornea to heal up faster and also makes
it more comfortable for the patient right after surgery and if you're finding value from this
video so far definitely hit that like button and subscribe and i'll see if i can help you further
with my future videos coming out another great use for bandage contact lenses is for dryness
which seems counterintuitive because a lot of times contact lenses can actually cause your eyes
to be more dry but when your dryness has reached a certain level where you get keratitis inflammation
dry patches on the surface of the cornea you actually have damage to the cornea then sometimes
putting that bandage contact lens and acting like a shield can actually help the cornea out it can
help it heal and it actually can protect the cornea from being exposed to the air that can
actually dry the surface of your eye out another one is recurrent corneal erosions this is where
someone might get a scratch or an abrasion and later because that new tissue is really soft and
hasn't fully gripped onto your cornea sometimes they'll go to sleep and they'll wake up and rip
that previous trauma open again and could be very very painful and so they found by using a bandage
contact lens on this person sometimes if you wear it for three months changing the contact lens out
it actually can help that cornea heal better and then that person doesn't have a recurrence
of that corneal erosion for at least a year now i did specific videos about corneal abrasions and
recurrent corneal erosions if you want to check out that more in depth check out the link below in
the description now let's be serious here if you have an eye injury even if it's just a scratch you
need to go in and see your eye doctor work with your eye doctor to know what the best treatment is
don't be just putting on a contact lens as a bandage contact lens to treat your own scratch
likely you need to work closely with an eye doctor you need to be using antibiotic eye
drops anti-inflammatory eye drops to make this safe because there can be some complications
to wearing bandage contact lenses like infections that might happen on that open wound on the cornea
so don't do this to yourself this is a treatment a prescribed treatment by your doctor you need to
go in and see your doctor another interesting developing technology with soft contacts are
augmented and virtual reality smart contact lenses in fact there are hard contact lenses scleral lens
is being made right now in fact the technology has advanced so far that it's been tested in the
eye it's for mojo lens if you want to check out that video i just made a video talking
specifically about that really neat technology I'm Dr. Neal Guymon, Dr. EyeGuy, stay focused